After being asked by YouTube’s music editor to feature their latest album, FLORA, as a streaming preview, three-piece Swedish band Fredrik decided to create a carefully premeditated visual accompaniment to their album. They plotted and directed a piece over half an hour long, that questions music video conventions.

“These days, the whole idea of releasing records feels kind of abstract and non-defined, so we thought this sounded like a fresh take on the whole thing,” explains drummer Ola Lindefelt.

The entire video was shot and then reversed in post-production. But because the camera is moving forward throughout the duration of the video, the detail is not immediately obvious, and it isn’t until the first glipmse one catches of a man bicycling backwards that it truly clicks.

Logistically, Fredrik knew that they wanted the route to start from the ocean and return to their garden studio. To make this happen, vocalist and multi-instrumentalist Fredrik Hultin — who also did the biking for the shoot — began at home base and slowly made his way out to the coast. Hultin listened to FLORA during his bike ride and managed to pace the entire route to the music, but the video was later slowed down for a “dreamier feel.”

“The original timing was lost,” says Lindefelt, “but a new one appeared.”

“These days, the whole idea of releasing records feels kind of abstract and non-defined, so we thought this sounded like a fresh take on the whole thing.”

— Ola Lindefelt, drummer of Fredrik

Front and center in the video is a toy wolf, which the band has named Ylva, after an ancient Scandinavian name which translates roughly to “wolf mother.”

“The original idea for the video was to imagine a wolf having a nightmare about the city. Hence the no-faces, blurry, backwards, stuck type of feeling,” says Lindefelt. “The wolf itself was a gift from an old friend of ours, Iris Piers, a Dutch filmmaker we collaborated with for [our last record] Trilogi. As we so frequently do in this band (with instruments, with equipment, even with songs), we also started to give this wolf a personality, and more and more seriously used her as part of our creative talks.”

As the band was constantly asking itself, “What would Ylva do?” the wolf’s significance throughout the FLORA became so apparent that the band decided they simply had to give the inanimate object due credit.

“We had to give her a cameo of some sort,” Lindefelt says, “so we made her the star of this visual soundtrack, and also named the first song after her (which also coincides with the fact that Fred’s voice frequently peaks to a howl).”

In stark contrast to the band’s involved and highly colorful music, the video is simple, shot using basic technologies and equipment, no cuts, and very little editing. The band wanted to keep things as “un-slick” and “raw” as they could. One wonderful album and music video later, Lindefelt describes what he’s learned: “Keep it simple! Oh, and backwards jogging in slo-mo looks pretty damn dope.”

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Vivian Hua (華婷婷) wears a lot of random hats, but has somewhat mastered globetrotting like a hobo and evading traditional 9-to-5 work schedules. She enjoys observing human idiosyncrasies perhaps more than anything and is a magnet for homeless people (a joy) and bug bites of all types (absolutely terrible). Through her work, she hopes to embrace the temporary while documenting the nostalgic, using divination and dream symbolism as guides through the cosmic maze. Additional writing, art, video, and other crap, like her astrological chart, can be seen at www.inallthings-patterns.net. She is the Editor-in-Chief of REDEFINE magazine, and quite appreciates unsolicited personal e-mails just to shoot the shit and narrow the gaps between human beings.